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Biography of Wesley Clair MitchellName: Wesley Clair MitchellBirth Date: August 5, 1874 Death Date: October 29, 1948 Place of Birth: Rushville, Illinois, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: economist Wesley Clair Mitchell The American economist Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948) was one of the most prominent contributors to the study of business cycles and was also among those who first recognized the importance of sound empirical research in economics.Born on Aug. 5, 1874, in Rushville, III., Wesley C. Mitchell was the eldest son of a Civil War veteran. Despite material difficulties, Mitchell completed his college and graduate education at the University of Chicago, receiving his doctorate in 1899. He married Lucy Sprague in 1912. His main activities, research and teaching, were only briefly interrupted, mainly for government service. During one such interlude, in 1914, Mitchell wrote a highly influential monograph, The Making and Using of Index Numbers, for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.Analyzing the Business CyclesMitchell's major treatise, Business Cycles (1913), represents a pioneering effort to provide an "analytic description" of the pervasive and recurrent but also complex and changing fluctuations that are observed in the …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…work paved the way for research on uses of cyclical indicators in the analysis of current business conditions and short-term forecasting.Mitchell served by presidential appointment on national committees on social trends (1929-1933), cost of living (1944), and others. He had strong humanitarian sympathies and believed that advances in economics and other social sciences can and should help to reduce such defects of the economic system as recurrence of depressions and unemployment, inequality of opportunity, concentration of power, and material insecurity. Mitchell died on Oct. 29, 1948. Further Reading The best collection of essays on Mitchell is Arthur F. Burns, ed., Wesley Clair Mitchell: The Economic Scientist (1952), which contains a comprehensive list of Mitchell's publications. Further background on Mitchell's role in economic thought is in Paul T. Homan, Contemporary Economic Thought (1928); Henry W. Spiegel, ed., The Development of Economic Thought: Great Economists in Perspective (1952); and Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 5 (1959). |